Unofficial news and tips about Google

February 17, 2007

Finding Custom Search Engines

Google doesn't provide a way to find custom search engines built by other users, but you can restrict a normal Google search to the homepages of those search engines. You just have to add [site:google.com inurl:coop/cse] to your query. For example, you can use [site:google.com inurl:coop/cse css] to find custom search engines for CSS.

This might be useful if you have to do some research on a narrow topic and the regular Google search doesn't return good results. By restricting your search to a list of sites about CSS or web programming, you'll definitely find great results even for ambiguous queries like "position" or "display".

To make things even easier, I created a custom search engine that searches through more than 100,000 custom search engines.

Google should really add meaningful titles to specific Custom Search Engines. The CSE that is named "State DOT Search Engine," for example, is titled "Google Co-op - Custom Search Engine" like every other CSE.